Thursday, April 13, 2006

Maundy Thursday: The Institution of the Eucharist

This is an appropriate quotation from C.S. Lewis for today, Maundy Thursday:

"I do not know and can't imagine what the disciples understood Our Lord to mean when, His body still unbroken and His blood unshed, He handed them the bread and wine, saying they were His body and blood...I find no difficulty in believing that the veil between the worlds [heaven and earth], nowhere else (for me) opaque to the intellect, is nowhere else so thin and permeable to divine operation. Here a hand in the hidden country touches not ony my soul but my body. Here the prig, the don, the modern, in me have no privilege over the savage or the child...The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand. Particularly, I hope I need not be tormented by the question 'What is this?'--this wafer, this sip of wine. That has a dreadful effect on me. It invites me to take 'this' out of its holy context and regard it as an object among objects, indeed as part of nature. It is like taking a red coal out of the fire to examine it: it becomes a dead coal." (from Letters to Malcolm, Ch.19)

See the previous post (below) for another good meditation for today in the church calendar.

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